Colin Woodard has done much to show how the United States are mosiac. If you haven't read his previous work, this will be quite interesting. And if you have, it still something to read, it might just be as engaging.

This book covers its topic in much greater detail than was necessary. If you love early 19th-century micro-history you will enjoy Union. If this topic is not your cup of tea save your money.

In this work, Collin Woodard covers the history of the different national myths that have been competing throughout America’s history (to use an understatement) up through the present. His narrative is constructed through a focus on several particular originators and promoters of the dueling visions of the nation and includes both familiar faces like Frederick Douglass and Woodrow Wilson and lesser-known figures who have played surprisingly outsized roles, such as historian George Bancroft.

Between having never previously read any of Woodard’s other works, this book’s subject matter and the somewhat slow buildup at the start, I anticipated an informative, but ultimately dry read. What I experienced instead was an engrossing narrative about all of the battling strains of thought over what makes America a nation - America as a beacon of freedom for humanity, America as a divinely-sanctioned white ethnostate, America as a nation formed by the frontier, and of course, America as a hypocritical entity that claims to stand for the freedom and equality of man yet very actively oppresses all those within its borders who aren’t Anglo-Saxon and male. At different times it was eye-opening, thought-provoking, genuinely shocking and upsetting (these latter two especially as he charted the rise of and halcyon days of the racist ethnostate narrative), and at the end, a little hopeful. But after the beginning introductions, it was rarely ever dull. And although Wooded extensively details the lives of each and every one of his selected figures, his writing is so clear and accessible that at no point did I feel like I had lost track of what ultimately proved to be a very convincing big picture over which specific national myth was ascendant in any major point in American history.

To any history-lovers out there, I definitely recommend this extremely readable and very compelling overview of the national identity conflict that has shaped the United States and continues to do so. Meanwhile, I personally look forward to exploring Woodard’s older works.